About “The Pyramid of Corruption”

Synopsis

So you think corruption is something government officials indulge in that makes governance inefficient and painful for the public? So you think India will be fine and dandy if this is eradicated? Think again. In The Pyramid of Corruption, I argue that corruption, defined as ‘abuse of public power for private gain’, runs much deeper than that in India—so deep that it is embedded into the very foundation on which the Indian nation rests. Truly removing corruption from India, therefore, requires us to redo the Indian nation from scratch; tightening the rule of law won’t do.

We’re being led to believe that corruption is nothing more than misconduct by individual government officials—a minister here, a bureaucrat there—in an overall system which otherwise ensures public gain. But such corruption is of an operational nature and its impact is negligible compared to that of the corruption that defines the overall system in India. Much of what we’re taught to be patriotic and supportive of the public weal in India is in reality a deep, fundamental, and dangerous form of ‘abuse of public for private gain’ that threatens to wipe out entire linguistic peoples and races. It is very important, therefore, to understand the relationship between corruption in India and Indian nationalism. Global anticorruption watchdogs such as Transparency International and the World Bank cannot offer any help here because they are solely concerned with operational corruption.

Nations are not abstract, indefinable, ancient or divine entities but, as Rabindranath Tagore put it, recent machine-like organizations of politics and commerce erected by fallible humans to achieve definite material ends. Contrary to popular belief in India, the Indian nation—as opposed to India the country—was installed by the British and not by the Indians. The British came to India for trade, and over time, built up an elaborate system of exploitation necessary to ease the process of sucking the vital force of India and maximizing the value yield from it. It is this systematic distortion of India—produced with racial hatred and uncontrolled greed—that we know as the Indian nation today. Therefore, abuse of public power for private gain is in its very foundations, its very material objective.

This British corruption—political and economic—created such havoc in the lives of Indians that it led to one of the greatest anticorruption movements of history: India’s freedom struggle. While this struggle and the consequent creation of an independent Indian nation are very important and desirable events from the point of view of reducing the abuse of public power for private gain inherent in the British rule of India, they did not eradicate corruption in India. On the contrary, by continuing the colonial view of India as one (albeit not one indivisible mass of darkness, weakness, or barbarism as alleged by the British) the leaders of India’s freedom struggle, including Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, sowed the seeds of a deep and elusive form of corruption: the one inherent in the mishandling of diversity. This form of corruption rose to become a crucial ingredient of patriotism at a time when any mention of India’s diversity was considered hostile to the interests of the freedom struggle.

I argue that mishandling diversity is corruption in a very fundamental sense. When a private entity such as a political party is different from the public in some sense—say in terms of race, language, culture, or the like—the former can never obtain power over the latter in a manner free from corruption. This is because, when power is transferred across a diversity border, it is always done either unknowingly or unwillingly by the transferor, and it only needs to be used by the transferee for it to become abuse for private gain. Not only politics, but economics, too, is an easy conduit for corruption inherent in the mishandling of diversity. When the two parties in a trade transaction have a diversity border between them, each is encouraged to abuse the other for private gain because they lie outside the domain of concern of each other. Finally, the party with a greater corruption propensity succeeds in accumulating capital by extracting it from the party whose propensity is lower. I argue at length that the diversity distance between the British on one side and the peoples of India on the other was a prerequisite for the political and economic corruption that enabled the British to establish themselves as India’s colonial masters, and consequently, to create the Indian nation.

The centralization of both political and economic power (the latter is better known as capital) is corruption when there is a diversity border separating the few who sit on the stockpile of power and the many from whom power is taken. We can describe such centralization of power or capital as cultural in order to distinguish it from the well-known general form of centralization in which it matters little whether the few are separated from the many by a diversity border or not. Cultural centralization of both political and economic power, which is corruption itself, was crucial to the creation of the Indian nation by the British.

The thesis that mishandling of diversity in India is not a British invention but something that is going on in India from the beginning of its known history is central to the book. Such mishandling formed an important part of the ancient Aryan worldview, which was essentially that of corrupt brahmanas. This is not to undermine the worldview of the non-corrupt brahmanas from whose ilk have stemmed the great treasure troves of spiritual wisdom, i.e., the Upanishads, but to point out that the very same Aryan race has failed in setting a lofty standard when it comes to handling ‘others’ in society. In this corrupt and ancient view the world is a Pyramid with the pure and superior brahmanas at the apex and everyone else arranged in an ancient hierarchy of impurity and inferiority based on the diversity distance from the apex. I call this Pyramid the Aryan Pyramid of corruption—a metaphor for India’s infamous caste-system which arose as a result of brahmanic notions of exclusiveness and ritual purity.

The pattern of thought ingrained into Indian minds by this ubiquitous and ancient Pyramid has permeated every institution of the Indian nation: it could not have been otherwise. Most importantly, it was central to the fundamentally corrupt idea of India popularized by the Indian National Congress—itself an Aryan Pyramid with high-caste north-Indian Aryans at the top—during the freedom struggle and after: the idea that Indians are all surreally one and can be effortlessly and silently inducted into an unadvertised hierarchy of inferiority. I argue that, as time rolled on, the Congress took not a few leaves from the book of British colonialism, topped it up with the corruption of the Aryan Pyramid, and rendered the independent Indian nation doubly corrupt by definition. This resulted in high-caste north-Indian Aryan domination in both politics and economics and legalized the corruption that is inherent in the mishandling of diversity. Mishandling of linguistic diversity is an important part of this, and I discuss it in quite some detail. Patriotic Indians are expected to participate in all this corruption with strength and devotion.

The problem of the Aryan Pyramid of corruption is daunting. It is easy to give up trying to solve it and, instead, to focus on the more superficial operational corruption. But, as I argue in the final chapter, it is both urgent and important to destroy the Pyramid’s politico-economic avatar. This is because politics and economics are the battlefields in which the corruption described in this book threatens to wipe out entire races, entire linguistic peoples. If this violence is to be avoided, and if the disintegration of India into tens of sovereign nations is to be avoided too, I suggest that this Pyramid must be destroyed in politics and commerce by taking two broad measures: first, to completely decentralize the Indian polity; and second, to do away with the idea of a unified Indian economy. These are steps that can actually be taken and solve actual problems on the ground; they may sound radical but we must not forget that the corruption they seek to remove is not of a simple nature. It only remains to be seen how seriously we take the deeper corruption afflicting the Indian nation, and how committed we are to doing what is possible to remove it.

To download the First Chapter (together with Table of Contents and References) completely free, click here.

Table of Contents

1.1. Of the British concern for corruption in their Indian operations; of the need to consider the overall British rule of India as corruption.

1.2. Of the similarity between the concepts of corruption and barbarism; of corruption at the global level; of the corruption of the clean nations.

1.3. Of the two types of corruption—operational and primitive; of the definition of corruption as ‘abuse of public power for private gain’; of the greater importance of understanding and removing primitive corruption.

2. CORRUPTION AND INDIA’S NATIONHOOD 22

2.1. Of nationalism and its relationship with corruption; of the inevitability of the creation of nations in self-defence.

2.2. Of the creation by the British of an elaborate infrastructure of corruption called the Indian nation.

2.3. Of the inheritance of the original British edifice of corruption by the Indians.

2.4. Of the denial of the existence of India’s primitive corruption by nationalists; of the corruption in the selective acceptance of Gandhian surrealism.

3. DIVERSITY AND CORRUPTION 46

3.1. Of the corruption inherent in the assumption of power over people on the other side of a diversity border.

3.2. Of corruption propensity or the propensity to assume power over others; of the diversity in this propensity.

3.3. Of the true import of the words of caution of Gandhi, Ambedkar and Tagore on the intermingling of diverse peoples.

3.4. Of the important role of politics and commerce in creating corruption when diverse peoples are forced to intermingle.

3.5. Of the concept of race in general; of the races of India in particular.

4. INDIA’S ANCIENT PYRAMID 73

4.1. Of the mishandling of racial diversity in India’s history; of the caste-system as a form of corruption that arose in consequence.

4.2. Of the Upanishads and their message of universal harmony; of the neglect of that message.

4.3. Of the Aryan corruption propensity and its functioning.

4.4. Of the metaphor of the Aryan Pyramid of corruption.

4.5. Of the influence of the Aryan Pyramid of corruption on the making of the independent Indian nation.

5. BRITISH CORRUPTION—POLITICAL 102

5.1. Of cultural centralization of power, the corruption inherent in it, and the case of the British colonization of India.

5.2. Of the political inertness of Indians; of the reckless inclusion of diverse peoples in their empires by the kings of old.

5.3. Of the vast difference in corruption propensity between the Britishers and the Indian rulers; of the creation of the Government of India on its basis.

5.4. Of the magnitude of the corruption due to the cultural centralization of power in the hands of the British in India.

6. BRITISH CORRUPTION—ECONOMIC 123

6.1. Of the corruption inherent in the cultural accumulation of capital; of the peculiar nature of India’s economic problem.

6.2. Of trade as a conduit for corruption.

6.3. Of the effect of diversity on corruption in trade; of the absence of moral barriers to corruption in the presence of a large diversity distance between the trading partners.

6.4. Of the railways, the telegraph, and the postal service; of the creation of a unified Indian economy to aid British corruption in trade.

7. CORRUPTION AND INDEPENDENCE 139

7.1. Of the psychology of the colonized intellectual; of the continuation of the corrupt colonial concept of the oneness of the colonized by the Indian National Congress.

7.2. Of the corruption inherent in the assumption of the power by the Congress to emancipate people across the diversity border; of the Congress as an Aryan Pyramid of corruption.

7.3. Of the induction by the Congress of diverse peoples into the inferior levels of the new national Pyramid using age-old Aryan methods of paralyzing minds.

7.4. Of the direct application by the Congress of corrupt British methods and instruments of coercion to force Indian rulers to submit to the independent Indian nation.

8. CORRUPT BY DEFINITION 166

8.1. Of the embedding of the ancient corruption of the Aryans into the foundations of the independent Indian nation; of the several protests against it.

8.2. Of the corruption due to the mishandling of diversity that led to the creation of Pakistan and Bangladesh; of the continuation of that corruption following it.

8.3. Of the corruption due to the mishandling of diversity inherent in the Constitution of India.

9. INDIA’S CORRUPT ECONOMY 184

9.1. Of the importance of cultural clustering in commerce; of the corruption inherent in the cultural accumulation of power by high-caste north-Indian Aryans who inherited the capital culturally accumulated by the British in India.

9.2. Of the rise of socialism; of the concomitant increase in the corruption due to the cultural accumulation of capital.

10. LANGUAGE AND CORRUPTION 201

10.1. Of the role of language in a nation; of language-related corruption.

10.2. Of the erection by independent India of a linguistic Aryan Pyramid of corruption; of the advantages and disadvantages to Aryans and non-Aryans, respectively, due to it.

10.3. Of the corruption inherent in imposing Hindi on the peoples of India; of the use of ancient Aryan methods of corruption in doing so.

10.4. Of the continued treatment of non-Aryans as inferiors due to Hindi imposition; of the corruption inherent in it.

10.5. Of Aryan migration into south India after independence; of Dravidian depopulation; and of the corruption inherent in the two.

11. DESTROYING THE PYRAMID 232

11.1. Of the importance and the urgency of destroying the Aryan Pyramid of corruption in politics and economics.

11.2. Of the possible methods of the political de-corruption of India.